The Ford dealer bowed his way down the aisle, holding a narrow-brimmed and piquant fedora, obsequious before a couple of hundred prospects. His wife stared into infinity, her cylindrical hat indicating a level stance in the face of mortality. A tiny wino brakeman slipped in because he’d seen the gathering. The preacher materialized in the wings, counted the house and withdrew to await the swelling crowd. Deke Patwell was on hand to report the loss. A lip reader from the stationery store sat front and center with her own missal. The song “Chapel in the Moonlight” came dimly from invisible speakers. There were five Indians with hard Cheyenne features, two of whom were young enough to be suspects as Mary’s paramour. Andrew had a cast-metal articulated earth-mover, which he rolled quietly back and forth between his feet. His mother moved her shoe to block its progress and Andrew looked up at her with no expression whatsoever.
Scattered around the audience were people never before seen in town, friends of Mary’s from all over the Rockies. They were uniform in age but staying well away from each other.
The minister began to move under the arcade of flowers past the casket toward the Recent Graduates pushing the lectern at him from the opposite direction. “Chapel in the Moonlight” diminished and disappeared. Patrick’s mother drew back the silk string from her missal and raised the face of one who, as the mother of a suicide, had nowhere to hang her next glance. Dale seemed to be saying, This is how it is.
The minister gazed for a long time at his own little volume; and when the moment came at which its pages could best be heard, he turned it open, gazed, then abruptly closed it again: he would speak from the heart. That was a good one, and everybody looked at him, even the Recent Graduates, sharpening expressions in anticipation of something daring.
“Young Mary Fitzpatrick,” he crooned, “was a free and delightful spirit …” He paused. Perhaps he never should have paused, or paused so long, because the fury Patrick had feared arose in him and he spoke.
“Shut up,” said Patrick in a clear voice. “We knew her.” The quiet was like undertow.
The minister’s head fell with patience. Patrick arose. His mother’s face turned in horror. Nearly half of the audience got up and started to the rear. The editor-in-chief gazed back at Patrick, then led the group out. Aaron Clark, the prosecutor, stayed close alongside the editor. Dale, after a moment’s reflection, left with them. Patrick’s grandfather pulled Andrew onto his knee. The Indians milled and went, leaving one frightened young man in a Levi jacket and carrying a broad-brimmed uncreased straw. That’s our man, thought Patrick, but I won’t talk to him. It’s all disgrace. Patrick walked up to the minister and demanded to know where he had gotten the business about the free and delightful spirit. “You never met her. That was an unhappy girl and she isn’t going anywhere. She’s just dead.” What remained of the audience stirred at this ghastly speech.
Patrick turned to go and spotted the Indian. He changed his mind about talking to him. They looked at each other hard and Patrick asked him to wait outside. Patrick watched him turn slowly and go into the blind light at the door, affixing the straw hat as he did so, causing a sudden deep shadow to reveal his face as he stared back in the glare, his expression very much that of something cornered and awaiting necessity, grave and shy at once.
“Have you had enough?” He saw his mother. He was blank. “Have you had enough, I said! I said—”
“I heard what you said.” She was right into his face. He gazed off at the casket and thought about that Indian in the sidewalk glare, the angular, expressionless face lit by the dark under his straw hat. “You said nothing.”
Between the pews Patrick’s grandfather led Andrew to the rear. The old man looked upon Patrick with a sadness he’d never allowed to be seen before. Patrick couldn’t understand the expression at all, not at this time.
“Take it easy, Pat,” he said. “I’ll bring little Andrew here. It’s just best for you to go on out of here. Andrew wants an arrowhead. So I’ll try to find him one. And then they’re going to bury her, see. And what I’m saying is it’s just best if you go on out of here, Pat.”
“Did you happen to notice the newspaper editor?” His mother inquired. She walked off, leaving no time for a reply, though in an instant of stunned, relieving giddiness, which shot through his grief like a tiny spark, he almost told her that he read only the sports page. Then he thought of his grandfather and walked toward the light. He knew and felt the people’s close watch on him. He had always understood that to observe the burying of other people’s dead was one of the few things that made their lives palatable.
But best of all the agony of those who remained. Aha! There had not been a good death like this one in Patrick’s family for some time. His father’s death in the desert of the Great Basin had seemed remote. There had been a dry spell. But Patrick knew, too, that he had not learned; his grandfather had walked out and given them nothing. There was nothing in the old cowboy’s face, his straight-backed walk toward the door, to give them anything. And Patrick had raved. He had raved for nothing. So this was a good one. This was one of the best ones they had ever seen.
25
THE INDIAN WAS ON THE SIDEWALK, CARS DISAPPEARING fast around him. He dropped his face slightly at Patrick’s appearance in the door and then looked once behind him. Patrick saw something guarded and ready in his stance, the clear, round, pale brim intersecting his delicately modeled forehead.
“Do you need to see me?” Patrick asked.
“If there is something between us.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? Is that Indian talk?”
“I don’t know.”
“What’s your name?”
“David Catches.”
“Well, they’re going to bury my sister. Will you be going?”
“You’ll make another speech. I don’t want to hear that kind of thing.”
“Then why don’t you come to the house tonight?”
David Catches followed a police cruiser with his eyes as it rounded the corner and vanished at low speed.
“What time?”
“Before the sun goes down and we lose our light. That way we won’t be stuck inside. Do you know the way out there? Do you know how to get to our place?”
“Of course. I helped your grandfather.”
“I guess I knew that.”
“You were in the Army. At that time your grandfather didn’t take care of himself. I didn’t have any rattles. I had a Goldenrod fence stretcher and a slick-fork saddle. Mary brought me there to make him an Indian. I punched cows and peeled broncs for a couple of years. But I saw a way to get out one night and I was gone. I got away just before I learned to think like him.”
An old man walked by, leading matched springers. He walked his dogs according to the National Bureau of Standards, so that people could set their watches by him. In Deadrock there were children who thought one told time by dogs.
“When did all this occur?”
“We went to Grassrange and I worked for an Indian who ranched on Flatwillow Creek. A guy sent me some horses to break, from over at Sumatra. Mary came with me! We had a trailer house down in the trees. We had a good dog and four good saddle horses. We were happy. Then something must have gone wrong. Anyway, Mary was gone, one day just gone.”
“She turned up in Roundup.”
“I don’t know.”
“Then on down to Warm Springs. Hey, I’m giving you the details.”
“I just don’t know.”
A silence fell over them, an unresisted silence like a trance. Then David Catches said, “You’ve got to go now. I will see you tonight.” To Patrick it seemed a moment later that the silence resumed. Except that this time an arrangement with straps and pulleys lowered Mary into the earth between panels of artificial turf that covered the scars that the machinery had left making the hole. Only the family was there, and since Patrick was responsible for the absence of the priest, it was felt he should say something by way of a benediction. He said, “
I’ll never see her again.”
It required three cars to carry the family. The cars were parked down on a blacktop crescent below the mausoleum. You could see the foothills from here and a few farm buildings along the base of the escarpment, like curious physical interjections in the landscape. Patrick viewed this all helplessly as Mary’s habitat, knowing that on this broad hill, picked for its view, gale-driven snow stretched immense drifts toward the west, over everything, over stones and monuments, and that there was nothing that could be done for that. On the upper end of his own ranch, a miner had, years ago, filled coffee cans with cement and pressed marbles into its surface, picking out the name of his three dead children. So anyway, except that there was nothing new in this, it was the one thing that was always new.
26
IT WAS PITCH DARK. “I AM MARION EASTERLY,” SAID THE voice. “You never let me exist. I am not allowed to let you rest. But one night at the proper phase of the moon, a neither-here-nor-there phase of the famous moon, I will arise in the face of our mother and our father and I will be real and you will not have been sent away to school and the proper apologies will be made and you still will have won the roping drunk at the Wilsall rodeo; and all, all will be acceptable.” Patrick turned on the bedside lamp and there was Mary, grinning and buttoned up in a navy peacoat. “Take away the offending years,” she said, “for they have ruined us with crumminess and predictability.”
“Go to bed,” Patrick said to Mary. “Anyone can see you’ve gotten yourself altered.”
Dale turned around in his front seat to look straight at Patrick. The driver, never seen before, presented himself as a concerned friend of the cemetery franchise. He offered to drive and they let him. The other cars were driven by concerned friends of the cemetery as well.
Dale said, “That was quite a deal you put on, Pat.”
“How long did it take you to pump yourself up to say that, Dale?”
“No time at all.” By his own scale, Dale was dauntless.
“Well, if my grandfather would have the courtesy to die, it might mean something to you, even as a lease deal. Why don’t we pull the other car over and find out just how long Grandpa is going to pull this business of not dying?”
“Stop this,” said his mother. Patrick’s batty conduct made her practical.
“Driver, detain that car.”
The driver said, “This isn’t a patrol car.”
“I say stop that car. Remove the offending mystery.”
Dale said, “This will not continue.”
“My father is dead as well,” said Patrick. “But he’s no use that way, is he? He’s no use to Boeing aircraft and he’s no use to us— Driver, pull that car to the shoulder. I accuse its occupant of lingering.”
Patrick could tell that he was ignored like a bad drunk. Beautiful scenery rolled past the windows and was of absolutely no use or comfort to anyone. He looked over at his mother, stranded in horror, and thought, What is the use of my going on like this? And there is no repairing what I’ve done, nothing to be helped by apology. No use.
But when he got to the ranch, he was quite astonished to see the broodmares pasturing the deep grass, their foals moving like shadows next to them, twisting their heads up underneath to nurse. That was one thing that seemed to go on anyway, something that helped, unlike the baleful and unforgiving mountains. He thought, I hope Andrew will find an arrowhead. And if he doesn’t, that Indian will make him one, if he’s any kind of an Indian.
What could I have done? I might well have canceled the reproving-older-brother performance. I might have done better than that. And was there anything to the remark heard over the years that Mary had “that look,” that she was doomed? We shall quiz the Indian as to doom. We are encouraged to think they are the only ones with coherent attitudes on the subject. It’s the world-wide aborigine credit bureau.
The dinner table was set and there was food. Patrick didn’t know how it got there and he had no idea how the five people converged at the same time while the late-afternoon sun blazed through the windows. It was clear that no one but Andrew was going to do anything with the food. Funeral meats, thought Patrick. Where does that come from? I’m afraid of the thought.
“How do you like that dinner?” he asked Andrew.
“It’s great,” said Andrew. “Except for those things, those Brussels sprouts.”
“Well, eat up.”
“Gonna.”
Then Patrick’s mother began to sob. She sobbed bitterly and deeply, as though a convulsion was at hand. Dale looked across at Patrick. “Are you happy?” he asked. Patrick shook his head. He was wrong again. Dale wasn’t even gloating.
“Aw, come on, Mama, please stop,” Patrick heard himself say.
“… can’t …” In her grief she looked strangely like Mary.
“It’s over. Nobody could do anything.”
“It isn’t true,” she choked. “It’s not.”
Andrew looked from face to face, as if he were at a tennis match. Dale stood up. He wasn’t an impressive man, but he seemed to have a right to his disgust.
“I’m going to the bunkhouse,” he said. “I’ll have the car ready in a bit. We’re going to leave immediately.” He turned to Patrick. “What have you and your sister done?”
“What have my sister and I done!” Patrick repeated in an astonishment that faded easily.
Dale lifted his wife to her feet. “There are things you don’t do. Andrew, let’s go.” The pale lighting designer had gotten indignant. Patrick felt an odd strength in it.
“I’m still eating!”
“We’ll stop on the way. Get up!” Andrew raised his hands and shrugged philosophically. Then he stood. When the three went through the dining room door, Dale had one more thing to say: He said, “You’ve shed all of it you’re going to on my wife. It was an old trick of your father’s. But don’t you start.”
Dale left, crazily brave in his elastic-waist vacation pants and loud shirt. Patrick did note that he stood up for his own. And what do I stand up for? You better think of something fast.
27
PATRICK’S GRANDFATHER, MASHING PEANUT BUTTER ONTO AN unheated English muffin with the back of a spoon, watched a wasp cruising the honey jar and asked Patrick if he wanted to unload the ranch. He was sure that a pigeon in the form of a deer hunter from Michigan would appear.
“What else would we do?”
“I don’t know. Get on out of here maybe.”
“It seems like I just got back.”
“We could go to the Australia.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Country like this used to be. No sprinklers, no alfalfa, no yard lights, no railroaders, no nothing.”
“I don’t know,” said Patrick. “I don’t want to go to Australia.” He visualized Limey prison descendants photographing koala bears in vulgar city parks.
“This country used to be just nothing and that’s when it was good. And they say the Australia is one big nothing. I’m telling you, Patrick, I bet we’d do good out there. You can run a spread with just your saddle horses.”
Then it got quiet again. There was nothing further to be said about the Australia. There was not even anything to be said about the departing station wagon, whose lights wheeled quickly against the house.
“Tell me about David Catches,” said Patrick.
“Oh, yeah. Well, he was here for a while. It wasn’t right, but your sister had him here and he was of some use.
“What kind of use?”
“He was good with stock. Worked a long day. But then after that was done, he’d try to tell you how it was. I think Mary made him do that. I don’t think he wanted to.”
“What did you do about it?”
“I told him how it was.”
“How long did this go on?”
“Couple years.”
“How come I never heard about it?”
“Like I said, I didn’t feel it was right. I mean, here’s this Indian. And what
was Mary up to? I just didn’t feel it was my job to explain it.”
“Maybe it is.” That’s what the jailer thinks, thought Patrick: Throw in together and save the world.
“Anyway, he went to making an Indian out of me and it wasn’t in the cards.”
“Why did he try to do that?”
“He had Mary about halfway made over and I guess he figured to start in on me.”
“Did you believe any of it?”
“Some of it.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know.”
“I mean just for instance.”
The old man twisted about. “Well, Patrick, this guy’d give you the feeling he’d know where Mary had gone.” Now there was absolute quiet. In a moment the old man spoke again: “Pat, what you said today did not absolutely one hundred percent wash with me.” Here it comes.
“Well, I don’t know. I don’t know if I’ve ever done anything right anymore. I already feel a little bad about the way they left out of here. Do you feel good about anything anymore?”
“I feel good about the Australia and the movies.”
“Come on.”
“Well, I like what I had, the way I used to live. There’s nothing to do anymore, but I’m too old to do much anyway. I can go out in the hills, but I got to take a horse I’m a hundred percent sure won’t buck me down. Who wants to go in the hills on a horse like that? So I think about something I know for certain, like how it once was for me, like when I nighthawked on the Sun River. Or I think about something I don’t know one thing about, like the Australia. And that works pretty good. I recommend it. I say it’s good. I’m not saying it has to be the Australia. It could be just an animal you’ve never seen.” The old man changed his gaze. Patrick turned to see David Catches in the doorway, his hat removed and held with both hands, his black straight hair swept back. Catches smiled and nodded. “You could think about that Indian,” the grandfather continued. “I don’t know any more about him than I do the Australia.” Patrick got up from the table.
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